


I Waited in the Dark for Something Not Quite Human—and All Too Human—to Begin

by ellemaris



Category: Annihilation (2018), Annihilation - Fandom
Genre: Body Horror, F/F, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, If you squint there's, fit-it is probably strong phrasing it's more like a patch., lena/ventress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-03-23 17:17:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13792422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellemaris/pseuds/ellemaris
Summary: Not everything was lost in the fire.





	I Waited in the Dark for Something Not Quite Human—and All Too Human—to Begin

**Author's Note:**

> I exist solely to make impossible things merely improbable and all things gay.

Not everything went up in flames.

It took a long time for the biologist to understand, but she was the only one left who could. After all, she and he had been changed as surely as the fracturing pillars of salt-glass trees and the many-toothed maw of the alligator. Why, then, were they untouched by the fire?

He wanted her to believe it was an act of God. He had gotten better, as the days went on, at being him, the other him, the him who had lost himself. This new he was finding him again, and the biologist was letting him, because why else had she done this, if not to survive and finish owing and fall into gracious forgiveness in his arms? So when he held her at night—it hadn’t been gracious; she'd had to ask him to, but that was only lack of initiative, understanding, and he'd done it without hesitation—and when she whispered the quiet questions she might have whispered to an empty night without him, or into his lips, were he still there, he answered just the way he would have, before, with a teasing benediction, a lingering half-Christian attachment to prayers and miracles.

To a human soul.

She, meanwhile, wanted to believe it was an act of science. She searched for the pattern in her DNA, the answer to what made her different—not only in form, but in _essence_ —from a crystalline tree or white-stucco vine washed smooth by an impossible tide. She wanted it to be the spark, the next answer, the next quest. The inexplicable _something_ that had made humanity different for so long. She wanted the answer to lie in their resilience, wanted the answer to be the opposite of that all-consuming self-destruction she understood only too well already.

But it was none of that.

She understood when she saw the bear.

It stumbled out of the tree line at three in the morning. While the night watch was lazing on their guard, safe in the face of a blackened husk miles in the distance and a missing shimmer in the trees fifty yards too close. While the new director who had kept them all here was asleep on the other side of the compound. While the biologist was awake, staring at the window beside her little cube of the observation deck, her blood in a petri dish beside her, unobserved, the microscope abandoned on the counter ten feet away.

She saw it before the gunshots and didn't even flinch. Didn't blink. She eyed it with the detached interest of her station, a biological curiosity of survival and further change. Where there should have been bullet holes, there were mushrooms, phosphorescent lilac specks that looked flat and ghostly under the wide-wash floodlights on the perimeter. It lumbered. It ran on too many limbs, now, its bearish forepaws and hindquarters joined by a limp amalgamation of human arms and legs sprouting from its armpits like fleshy weeds, dragging along the ground, knuckles and toes in the dirt.

Cass, she thought in complete comprehension, and wondered if the only part of her mind left intact from her time in Area X was the part that performed her work, the part that trafficked in science, because emotion seemed beyond her, further every day. And, as the Cass-bearing bear prowled closer, even her science felt wrong. Twisted. She had walked into the shimmer so programmed to see invasion by a lifetime working to comprehend cancer that her first instinct seeing anything out of the ordinary was _malignant_. As she stood and started for the stairs, knowing she would go to her without hesitation, she knew something in her had been reprogrammed to see only change.

That had to be better than horror.

Then the shooting began, and the bear laid in a heap five feet from the wall, bleeding red that glinted purple under the lights on the scopes of fifteen guns pointed its way while the biologist collected her samples. The silent biologist. The mad biologist. The biologist who never slept. The biologist who had been the first through the doors after it fell, before the soldiers had even lowered their guns. She knew how they spoke of her since her return. It was easier to simply be where she needed to be in her quest for answers, or to be with him, who never spoke of her as though she were anything other than a name. _Lena_.

It was only with him she felt like a name at all.

She had the strangest urge to take up the human limbs in her arms, to gather them to her chest like a bouquet, or a cluster of corn-stalks at the branch of a maze, or a lover.

Instead, she gathered blood and mushrooms, covered the wreckage of Cass and Creature with a sterile specimen blanket, and wondered when it would rise again.

Each day that followed only confirmed her sudden understanding. In some ways, she doubted the understanding belonged to her. While he became more and more himself with every passing day, she sensed she became less. No, less wasn't the word for this. There was gaining involved, and with each new understanding gained, there was room for one less lie. One less self-deception. One less chance for self-destruction. Less was, perhaps, the right word for her humanity. More, perhaps, was the right word for herself.

The crocodile never came. But something bulbous and swollen and as translucent as the coastal trees oozed its way into their tract of land on Monday, boneless and sucking like a creature from the deep, not quite jellyfish, not quite cephalopod, but with three apertures full of human teeth and the gargling voices of three men who had been thrown (had thrown themselves?) into a death at sea.

She asked them not to shoot it.

No one listened.

Tuesday came eight spindly legs; fibrous, shimmering webbing dragging behind it like a wedding train; branches sprouting from its black-bead head to drape willow-bough vines over its own back in an arachnid parody of stag-beetle antlers; studded with male human nipples instead of flowers. Or thorns.

When she begged for it to be taken alive, they locked her up for a week.

More came in her absence. The men from the eleventh expedition. A left-behind from the swamp huts. They came in bits and pieces too incomprehensible to be kept alive and were brought to her cell in smears of blood and scraps of fur and swaths of shrubbery, and the biologist continued her work. The unifying element in the chaos was unmistakable, but no one other than her still seemed to see the humanity in their visitors. She stopped asking for mercy, and they let him visit.

They asked questions. She wondered if “I don’t know” would be the last lie left within her. 

They let her out at dusk on the eighth day, when Josie staggered out of the forest, dragging half the world in her wake: a great sledge of foliage pulled by reins of flowers wrapped a thousand times around her blooming arms. Cradled there lay Anya, voiceless, breathing with mossball lungs as droplets of byproduct moisture dripped from the _Laccaria amethystina_ gills bulging from her throat, their bone-white stalks turned the wrong way up and stretched to meet behind her teeth—stipe in place of jaw.

The biologist had been given time and opportunity, in her cell with her graciously allowed equipment, to identify the mushrooms that grew on the bear. She was somehow unsurprised to see their mirror on their avenging Judas. Both had been colonized by decay.

And yet here they stood, having colonized death in return.

She was even less surprised to find it was Anya who had driven Josie out of the forest and back into the world of the uncorrupted. When they came, the bear rose again, tearing itself from beneath the sterile curtain, freeing itself from a specimen state to walk beside the two women like a thing domesticated, and no one shot, no one screamed: the compound held its collective breath while the director ran to get her out.

Josie could still speak. Her lips shed petals onto the earth between them. She could not come inside. Her legs were fleshless, thick dowels of trunk that crawled through the soil with the burrowing power of roots and earthworms, but they stretched out behind her for every step she had taken, and she was every tree she had passed.

She was Anya, too. The moss grew down from inside of her, out her ravaged back, a bloodless wound, and grew down the intertwining branches of Josie's chest. The moss bloomed tiny flowers in a ripple that mirrored the cadence of Josie's words. Josie breathed for her. They breathed as one.

Their hands were twined together as tightly as their inhumanity. Anya's was nothing but pristine brown fingers and unblemished nails. Josie's bloomed, but between, the biologist could still study a tracery of skin. Her face was more difficult: rosed, brambled. But among the thicket showed the faintest darkness smooth with the sheen of flesh rather than the dimples and craters of bark.

That was why they lived, after all. Why they hadn't burned.

A bit God, a bit science.

All human.

Human enough. 

"You would have stayed in the Reach."

Josie's branches bowed. Petals shimmered and skittered on her own breeze. “She died the same way as Cass, so I... It was leave her part-bear forever or make her part of me.” Her stare flickered to the aforementioned amalgamation. “No offense,” she added, quietly human. She cast her next glace over her vine-husk shoulder, as though she could stare all the way to the lighthouse. “It would have been content either way.” Then she turned her too-human eyes behind their wire-rimmed glasses down towards the being in her arms. “She couldn’t be.”

No one else approached. Here, outside, was danger for the untouched, relative safety for a biologist, a paramedic, and a physicist, who could not afford to be overheard. “You know too, then,” she said.

Josie nodded. “It chose us. It wants us.”

“Not us,” she pressed, voice sharp, almost angry.

“No,” Josie agreed. “The human blueprint.” She cocked her head. “It feels… familiar and foreign. Like something that almost fits. Not quite there yet.”

“Phase two,” said the biologist.

"Yes." Josie glanced down again. Her petals fell against Anya’s breathless lips. “She says we’re the vessel, now.”

In the first human moment Lena had felt in a long time, she asked, surprised, “You can hear her?”

Josie nodded again, all bow, all sway. Her petal-peppered lips smiled. “It’s strange.”

Lena considered asking, but the biologist already knew. It was strange, in the human way, that suddenly Josie would not be the quietest of them. It was strange, in the science way, to be. Like this. At all. And it was strange, in the God way, that after everything they had survived, after everything that had killed and failed to kill her, now would be the time Josie suddenly learned what it was to want to live.

“You love her,” Lena said quietly, and Josie beamed.

“Yes.”

She saw a flash of quiet companionship their first night on the deck together, sitting at the table in the near-dark, Anya flirting with boisterous pride and devil-may-care disregard for her own mortality, while Josie sat beside, quiet and withdrawn, with that look in her eyes that was half pain, half longing, and all basking in the company of someone she would take however she could get her. She saw bedrolls laid close together in a terror-filled night, saw the tears in Josie's eyes as she pled without words for their lives, and for Anya's trust. 

And Lena was glad, in the most human way possible, that these two had come to an understanding beyond anything else two mere humans could ever know.

She had something not-quite-like that, here. There was a difference in the duplication, in the mirror, a difference from the breaking and combining that had created the symbiosis of Josie and Anya. But there was something powerful in it, too.

Something that would make all four of them want. Want to survive this. Want to live to see what it wanted, what might become of the scraps of piecemeal humanity salvaged by the consciousness she had tried so painfully to bring to ruin.

It felt like some sort of prismic paradox, that this was a love story. If it wasn’t, she never could have survived it. The first phase. It drove her destruction, that awful mix of love and guilt, and now, because this was a love story, she had to survive it again—it was humanity who would perish in her stead.

Annihilation.

Strangely, it was the biologist who wished Lena could wish it were something different. The biologist didn’t need a love story. She needed only to understand, and to become. But until she did, Lena needed him. She looked up at her companions. They needed each other.

She glanced down at the bear. Their predator. Their lost Cass. Wondered how much of her was left, there. She sat on her haunches, ears pricked in that skeletal, horse-bird face with its all too human tongue. She looked like rage—rage and resignation.

Lena was leaving those behind, now.

Back in the Reach, Josie had been bittersweet in her acceptance. Lena thought the human part of her was about there. Arriving. Beginning to accept. Bittersweet. Anya—living-Anya, sharp-tongued Anya—had been powerful and fearful in her betrayal, and Lena knew her next words would bring all of that. Fear. Betrayal of kind. Power spoken to truth. She had little else left, now, that was hers in the way her almost-foreign name was. She would cling to science and truth for as long as she could, and when it inevitably all refracted around her, all she could hope was that she was only a step behind. That one day she would turn to him, and end up where Anya and Josie were now, tethered to everything and nothing, impossible, in love, and in bloom. 

Maybe others would come. Bits of their crucially conscious genome scattered through the wilds of the Southern Reach. But until then... 

“Five women. Scientists.” She paused, struck by a desire to laugh. “Abominations.” She smiled, just a little. “We’re going to end the world.”

Anya stirred, sharp eyes rolling her way, mushroom gills contracting like the folds of an accordion, but in the place of her vocal cords, they remained soundless. She held up five fingers, the five not wrapped around Josie, and her question was clear.

“You don’t feel her, then.” Another of the biologist’s questions answered. She had wondered if it was only through death that one became a part of another. The bear had devoured some of Cass’s being as it caused her end. Anya’s, too, but Josie had stolen it, had brought close but separate deaths together with her own.

Which left only her to carry the psychologist. Only her to mingle with that choice decay.

“We don’t,” Josie answered for the both of them. Unnecessary.

“I have her.” Dr. Ventress. The damned. The curious. The unmoved. They magnified each other’s distance. Made mockery of each other’s last shreds of sanity. Drew on each other’s fixation with the anomalous and broken—drew each other to him. 

In her week alone, Lena had found she didn't mind the company. It was no more a burden than any other part of her. Ventress wasn't a second voice, second thoughts, but a sense of unity and strangeness. A constant, gentle implosion in reaction to a death and a few drops of blood. 

And when they let him come to her, she didn't mind that it would never be just the two of them again. Wasn't it best, if he would never be him, that she was not quite herself, either? 

She knew, as deeply as she knew anything, that it was Ventress who allowed her to embrace the kind of self-destruction that was going carry her back inside those walls. Who would help her convince the still only human not to shoot her wild-worn companions. To convince them all to let their undoing inside their blanket-fort walls. Ventress, her latest cancer. 

Damaged goods, Cass would have reminded her. Gentle. Accepting. 

"I have her," she repeated, meeting the night-gold glint in three pairs of eyes. 

Whether in answer to the thought or the words, Lena didn't know, but the bear threw back it’s head, letting out a bark of distorted, guttural human laughter, a brutal, shocking imitation of the howl of a wolf.

Yes, thought the biologist. We’re all here together. No more or less broken than before.


End file.
